Hiding behind the mountains
I probably mentioned this in just about every single post related to Iceland, but it won’t hurt saying it again. The sunsets in Iceland are very special! Not only because the light is spectacular, but also because in the middle of the summer they last for hours and hours. The shot below was taken at 12.30am and the sun took another two hours to reach the horizon. And then it just rises up again straight away…
I didn’t know exactly where this road I was on was heading, but in Iceland it’s always a good idea to just drive, as getting lost usually brings you to some amazing places. I took this photograph a few minutes before reaching the bottom of the fjord (where I photographed this church) and the view from the top of the mountain was incredible. All the houses seemed empty and I felt like I was the only person in a 10-km radius.
UPDATE: A few people have asked about how I managed to bring out the detail in the really dark areas of the image. When I first saw this scene, although it looked amazing, I knew that there was no way to capture it the way I see it without using an ND grad filter. Since I didn’t have one with me, I shot 9 separate exposures (ranging from -4E.V. to +4E.V. exposure compensation) and then I blended all these shots into one final shot allowing me to take the bottom-left part of the image from one of the lighter exposures and the sun and the top-right part of the image from the darker exposure.